I was invited to pay a visit to the offices of DynamicCity last Friday to talk about what can be done to help spread UTOPIA. (For those that don't know, this is the company in charge of building the physical plant for UTOPIA.) A special thanks to Joel, Cory and Keith for taking time out of their day to talk to me.
There's some really exciting stuff on the horizon. A few years ago, the legislature passed SB66 to limit participation in UTOPIA by barring new cities from joining before July 1, 2007. Qwest was the main pusher of the bill and originally wanted to use it to kill the project. The moratorium was seen as a compromise that Qwest and UTOPIA member cities could live with. Now that it's coming up for expiration, new cities will be free to join the project.
We also spent a lot of time discussing how to bring UTOPIA to unincorporated county lands. It seems that the best solution is to create a special improvement district in conjunction with the White City Community Council. This would overcome the issues with not being a city without having to amend the law to make unincorporated areas eligible. This is going to be untested water since the law explicitly permits cities but doesn't specifically permit other entities. (By the same token, an SID is not explicitly prohibited either.) The next step is to round up some of my neighbors and start talking to Community Council members at next month's meeting to gauge the interest level.
If you live in White City and want to see UTOPIA in your area, please contact me as soon as possible. The next meeting is Wednesday June 6th at 7PM at Eastmont Middle School, 10100 S. 1300 E. Room #105 in Sandy. If a bunch of us show up in support of this project, we just might be able to get it rolling here and pave the way for other unincorporated areas to do the same.
